When a High-School Maths Teacher Decides to Take Up Farming

I. At the Farm, My Allergies Said Goodbye

Before the age of thirty, I had barely any memory of allergies. As far as I can recall, they only began recurring in recent years. Walking through grass in sandals, my feet would almost certainly be swollen and red by evening. Sometimes after a few poor nights’ sleep, my palms would swell, turn red and itch so badly I could hardly fall asleep.

I concluded that something in my lifestyle must be amiss, leaving me so susceptible to allergies.

So I appointed myself my own doctor, starting by improving my run-down state. I remembered the migraines I used to get when I was still a maths teacher a few years back – but whenever I went hiking in the mountains for a few days, even with heavy exertion, the headaches would never strike. That meant I was healthy when my surroundings were good and my body was in motion.

And then there were the allergies. Because the environment I lived in was too clean and I rarely had any contact with soil, even a short spell in Mum’s vegetable plot would leave me itching all over. What could be done? I could only go back to touching the earth, let my body readjust to a richer environment, including its microbiome, and make myself part of that environment again.

And so, during my sabbatical after leaving work, my run-down state gradually improved. Migraines almost never returned. Allergies still cropped up occasionally – until they vanished completely once I arrived at Xiqing.

In the turn from March to April, temperatures in Beijing were pleasant, and I could stay out in the field for hours, working with the soil. Back then, a farming novice at heart, I kept soaking my shoes while watering and stepping into the muck. To feel the earth better and work more comfortably, I often went without gloves, and every day I’d head home with mud caked on my clothes and shoes. Sometimes I’d joke with my husband that I’d turned into a little mud figurine.

The mud and water in the field have a pH level, and the soil teems with microorganisms. By evening, once I peeled off my shoes and socks, the tops of my feet would itch intensely and go blotchy red on most nights.

After a month of days spent with perpetually wet shoes, the allergic symptoms simply stopped. When the internship ended and I went back to my parents’ home in Hubei, I worked a little in Mum’s small vegetable garden every day. Apart from mosquito bites, I no longer developed any large patches of red, itchy swelling. Even working barefoot in sandals, my feet never swelled or reddened. It seemed I had finally, truly, overcome my allergies.

From allergy-prone to allergy-free – what happened in between?

I ate fewer snacks, and my diet was healthier;

I moved more, replacing dedicated exercise with physical labour in the field;

My daily routine became more regular;
I immersed myself in nature wholeheartedly, and my state of mind improved.

The intensive cultivation and diversified cropping across five mu of land struck me as endlessly fragmented; I had no idea how to organise my work. At first, I could only tell the cucumbers from the tomatoes. As for the details of their growth or cultivation, I knew nothing at all, nor could I glean any further information from my daily field rounds.

As my internship entered its second month, there were still many plots I chose to overlook – muskmelon, for instance. Ma Hao, another intern on the farm, was in charge of the muskmelon, but I had no interest in it and paid no mind to how he managed it. My attitude toward the first planting of watermelons was the same.

Focusing only on what I cared to focus on – at first I blamed my limited energy, since I had only just set foot in farming. In time, though, I came to see that this revealed how firmly I was still confined to the mindset of an intern, lacking any holistic view of the farm and failing to hold every crop in my thoughts. Clearly, for all the hard labour in those first two months, my state of mind was rather carefree.

It was not until June that things changed. Wang Xin, the farm owner, was due to leave for two and a half weeks of study and exchange in Germany, and day to day it would be only Ma Hao and me out in the fields. By June there were no newly planted crops left, yet the whole farm was at full capacity – hardly a plot lay idle. Just walking the rounds each day took up considerable time: different crops were at different stages of growth with different watering needs, and I was still a complete novice with barely two and a half months of farming under my belt.

During the weeks Brother Xin was away, all manner of management issues arose on the farm. But compared with when I first arrived, I had certainly done my best. In that stretch of time, every crop in the field – even the flowers and herbs tucked away in the far corners – was constantly on my mind.

Writing this article, I sit at my computer at home, yet the entire landscape of the farm is etched deeply in my memory: at least thirty-odd crops, with multiple plots sown at different timings. Running a farm demands such an extraordinary grasp of the whole picture – you can imagine how immense the challenge is for a beginner.

Over this period I came to appreciate deeply just how hard-pressed the smallholder practising diversified cropping truly is. The time invested in the field is enormous, yet impossible to measure.

In hot weather, little can be done in the field around midday, yet this is precisely when the plants are at their hottest. You need to understand the changes taking place in crops and soil at this hour – the more you observe, the deeper your understanding of the crops, the soil, and the environment will become.

It was through this process of repeated observation and verification that I developed an intuition for making immediate judgements. Take the example of transplanting cucumplers.

In mid-June, temperatures in Beijing soared close to 40 degrees, and during that spell Ma Hao and I transplanted a batch of cucumber seedlings. The heat was intense, and some seedlings – having been flooded several times while raising seedlings, with weak roots to show for it – had poor water-absorption capacity and insufficient transpiration. As a result, twenty of them simply died in the heat.

The evening we noticed the losses, we carried out the first round of replanting, loosening the soil and increasing the watering frequency to help the survivors through the heat. But some still died, so we replanted a second time. Even then, the losses remained relatively high, which left me deeply disheartened – yet it was after that setback that a shift began.

I was out in the cucumber field, observing and pondering, when suddenly a cool breeze swept through. So refreshing! The moment that feeling hit me, I thought of Brother Xin’s choice of weather for planting sweet potatoes and decided we should replant at once. I checked the forecast for the following day – not hot either. Was this not the perfect moment? The survival rate would surely be high!

So I hurried into the greenhouse, selected the healthiest cucumber seedlings, and set them in the ground. As it turned out, this batch did indeed enjoy a high survival rate. I simply chose to count it as a bit of progress of my own, and was happy about it for a long while.

First become a farmer, then a husbandman.

III. At the Farm, Harvesting a Sounder Mind

When I do this work, my attention rests entirely on the crops. I see how strawberries grow – this flower has not been properly pollinated. I wonder what a thinned fruit would become if left untouched, and how its absence would affect the others. I glimpse the past and the future of this plot.

When I weed, I imagine the life within the soil, the different stages of crop growth, the kinds and sizes of weeds, the differences between one weed and another. When can you stop weeding? How should the hand hoe fall? Should the roots be pulled out? How do you handle weeds close to the crops, and those farther away? What happens if you leave them?

The rewards of pondering these questions are bound to the land itself. Perhaps, spend long enough in the field, and the answers will come.

Since the internship ended, I keep returning to my first day at Xiqing. In late March, little had yet emerged from Beijing’s open ground, but spring was already stirring. On the last stretch of the bus ride, tall poplars lined both sides of the road, their drooping branches showing tiny new buds.

I remember the weather must have been lovely that day – the sunlight gentle, neither too harsh nor dimmed by cloud to gloom – and the strawberry plants lush with verdant leaves. I stood on the eastern side, watching Brother Xin not far away among the strawberry beds. All the strawberries seemed to joyfully encircle him, echoing his smile.

A feeling stirred in me, as though I were witnessing a masterpiece. For a moment I could not tell whether it was the wind or the energy he exuded over this ground.

For a moment I allowed myself to imagine: if I had a plot of my own, I would tend it with the utmost care. When I stood upon it, it and I would never be apart.